Pythagoras - A joke?

[dant]

From OPB (TV): "The History of 1" [I *think* this was the title]

Joke (Summarized from memory):

Pythagoras had a small group of followers and one of the rules
for membership was to abstain from beans. Why you may ask?
Because Pythagoras believes that every time you fart, a little
piece of your soul might escape.

Of course, it is a joke but I cannot vouch if this is historically
true or not!

Dan

 

[ark]

From OPB (TV): "The History of 1" [I *think* this was the title]
Dan

Perhaps the story is not far from the truth, but I wonder about the sound being harmonic. ;)

I read:

Among the Greeks, harmony and the soul were considered to be similar in nature, because all souls are harmonic. The hexad is also the symbol of marriage, because it is formed by the union of two triangles, one masculine and the other feminine. Among the keywords given to the hexad are: time, for it is the measure of duration; panacea, because health is equilibrium, and the hexad is a balance number; the world, because the world, like the hexad, is often seen to consist of contraries by harmony; omnisufficient, because its parts are sufficient for totality (3 +2 + 1 = 6); unwearied, because it contains the elements of immortality.

By the Pythagoreans the heptad--7--was called "worthy of veneration." It was held to be the number of religion, because man is controlled by seven celestial spirits to whom it is proper for him to make offerings. It was called the number of life, because it was believed that human creatures born in the seventh month of embryonic life usually lived, but those born in the eighth month often died. One author called it the Motherless Virgin, Minerva, because it was nor born of a mother but out of the crown, or the head of the Father, the monad. Keywords of the heptad are fortune, occasion, custody, control, government, judgment, dreams, voices, sounds, and that which leads all things to their end. Deities whose attributes were expressed by the heptad were ŧis, Osiris, Mars, and Cleo (one of the Muses).

Among many ancient nations the heptad is a sacred number. The Elohim of the Jews were supposedly seven in number. They were the Spirits of the Dawn, more commonly known as the Archangels controlling the planets(s).

Source: http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta16.htm

What seems to be the case is the last sentence in the quote above, about the Elohim of the Jews controling the planet.

Obviously, Pythagoras was a convert to Judaism, as already suggested by his name, "Pytha-" standing for Israel in the land of Canaan or "Put" (= Phoenicia), and "-goras" for "Giyora" meaning a Ger or proselyte.

Source: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Senate/7353/ammm_2_2.htm

 

[John G]

The hexad is also the symbol of marriage, because it is formed by the union of two triangles, one masculine and the other feminine... By the Pythagoreans the heptad--7--was called "worthy of veneration."... Among many ancient nations the heptad is a sacred number. The Elohim of the Jews were supposedly seven in number. They were the Spirits of the Dawn, more commonly known as the Archangels controlling the planets... What seems to be the case is the last sentence in the quote above, about the Elohim of the Jews controling the planet. Obviously, Pythagoras was a convert to Judaism, as already suggested by his name, "Pytha-" standing for Israel in the land of Canaan or "Put" (= Phoenicia), and "-goras" for "Giyora" meaning a Ger or proselyte.

The interpenetrating triangles seem to me like antimatter-matter, imaginary-real, 1st Jungian quaternity-2nd Jungian quaternity, etc. One triangle is like the quaternionic imaginaries. Two triangles are like the imaginary-real quaternionic imaginaries of an associative 4 complex-dim spacetime. The Cs kind of inferred that three is important for us 3rd Density beings like seven is important overall. But since things are "complexified" it is really two sets of three for us in third density. So what is bad about seven is not seven but that it is only one rather than two sets of seven. Seven is the imaginaries of the octonion. The non-associative octonion spacetime has the property as described by Danny Lunsford on Peter Woit's blog that you can't tie your shoes. He is jokingly referring to not being able to tell left from right which was a Cs clue for 4th Density and above. When Ark mentions working in 4D instead of 10D (4+4+2 where the last two kind of "complexify"), he is I think working on the 3rd density situation before moving on to 4th density. When Ark works on the hypercube, he is working on a close relative of the hyperdiamond that Finkelstein and a couple of his grad students (Gibbs and Smith) worked on at Georgia Tech.

 

[lamalamalamalama]

Was curious if anyone on the forum is trying to find more info on Pythagoras. Going through the book in the link made me feel like the powers in control went through quite a bit of effort to get rid of any knowledge he may have left. Also the comment by the C's on there being a lost science on Numerology came to mind.

'Numerology, or what Pythagoras wrought'
by Underwood Dudley


http://books.google.ca/books?id=udptayxY2E8C&pg=PA2&lpg=PA2&dq=pythagoras+mysticism+numerology&source=bl&ots=2jK6dtfNgE&sig=xPko8sybef_Sr7rTMxUN6m-QkIk&hl=en&ei=18vgTK2uGIHmsQOA5pDcCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=pythagoras%20mysticism%20numerology&f=false

 

[rs]

The hexad is also the symbol of marriage, because it is formed by the union of two triangles, one masculine and the other feminine... By the Pythagoreans the heptad--7--was called "worthy of veneration."... Among many ancient nations the heptad is a sacred number. The Elohim of the Jews were supposedly seven in number. They were the Spirits of the Dawn, more commonly known as the Archangels controlling the planets... What seems to be the case is the last sentence in the quote above, about the Elohim of the Jews controling the planet. Obviously, Pythagoras was a convert to Judaism, as already suggested by his name, "Pytha-" standing for Israel in the land of Canaan or "Put" (= Phoenicia), and "-goras" for "Giyora" meaning a Ger or proselyte.

The interpenetrating triangles seem to me like antimatter-matter, imaginary-real, 1st Jungian quaternity-2nd Jungian quaternity, etc. One triangle is like the quaternionic imaginaries. Two triangles are like the imaginary-real quaternionic imaginaries of an associative 4 complex-dim spacetime.

Uh, say what? I'm an engineer and all, but could you come a little closer to explaining this in "English"?

 

[John G]

The interpenetrating triangles seem to me like antimatter-matter, imaginary-real, 1st Jungian quaternity-2nd Jungian quaternity, etc. One triangle is like the quaternionic imaginaries. Two triangles are like the imaginary-real quaternionic imaginaries of an associative 4 complex-dim spacetime.

Uh, say what? I'm an engineer and all, but could you come a little closer to explaining this in "English"?

Yikes I looked at that at first and thought it sounded like something I could have wrote a few years ago and then noticed it was something I wrote a few years ago. Not that I think the general idea is wrong now, I just don't like to free associate out of context as much. The context would be this 6 page paper.

http://vixra.org/pdf/0910.0023v2.pdf

 

[Mal7]

Having just read the pages about Pythagoras in "Horns of Moses", I was reminded of a rather dense essay on the question of Pythagoras and the maxim "Eat No Beans" which I came across recently. The whole issue is likely no more or less than a wild goose chase of no particular importance, but if anyone wants to follow up this essay, the reference is:

"The Harm in Broad Beans: Legend and Reality" in the book Diseases in the Ancient Greek World by Mirko D. Grmek. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Pages 210-244.

The essay considers both food allergy reasons, and more symbolic explanations, which the writer tends to favour over the medical, allergenic explanation.

I will quote some passages, not so much to form any connected series of points, but just to give an idea of the scope of the essay:

"It was attributed to Pythagoras himself, the famed sage of the sixth century B.C., but Aristotle was aware that by his time the personal lucubrations of the master could not be clearly distinguished from the mass of material from his school.

[. . .] it concerns a legume called kuamos in Greek and securely identified with the broad bean, Vicia faba

[. . .] it is readily apparent that the context of the prohibition, though it is, broadly speaking, nutritional, is not really concerned with health in the medical sense. It is a section of the sacred diet, not a chapter on profane nutritional hygiene. The prescriptions cited above derive from the principle of ritual purity, not health."

[. . .] Is it possible to understand the prohibition as a practical consequence of the general idea of metempsychosis? From antiquity to the present, there have been those who thought so.

[. . .] Did people really believe that broad beans could be the home of souls in the process of transmigrating? It is tempting to understand an obscure Orphic line in those terms, 'Eating broad beans and gnawing on the head of one's parents are one and the same.' According to Pliny, some writers were convinced that Pythagoras condemned the use of this plant 'because the souls of the dead are in the bean.'

[. . .] The Orphic line that likens broad beans to the head of one's parents is cited by Plutarch during a discussion of the egg, its cosmological significance, and the prohibitions concerning it. According to Porphyry, the Pythagoreans taught that humans and beans sprang from the same original matter.

[. . .] The first modern information in the West regarding this neurotoxic syndrome dates from the middle of the seventeenth century

[. . .] In 1691, Bernardino Ramazzini, the founder of occupational medicine, described pea intoxication in subjects living in the Duchy of Modena.

[. . .] The Reality of Favism. Since the end of the last century, Western medicine has officially taken cognizane of certain individuals whose habitus and way of life seem entirely normal but who suffer from a strange idiosyncracy: give them a few broad beans to eat, or let them just cross a field of these papilionaceous plants in flower, and they fall into a hemolytic crisis."

[. . .] From the rebirth of classical studies in the fifteenth century until the nineteenth century, countless humanists glossed the tabu against eating broad beans. [. . .] For Neoplatonists, gnostics, and followers of similar philosophical systems, nothing was more natural than reference to cosmogonic myths, to the passage of souls into the beans, and to the mystical correspondence between this plant and the human body.

[. . .] However, belief in the real harmfulness of broad beans does not seem to have been lacking in Greek folklore. During a study of popular representations of the causes of infantile mortality, Richard and Eva Blum came across several Greek peasants who were convinced that broad beans are dangerous to infants and children [. . .] Is this really a survival of the Pythagorean teaching in the unlettered world of the Greek countryside? I do not believe so. Given the genetic conditions in some Greek communities, the danger was only too real. The harm in broad beans was probably discovered many times over by mothers attentive to the food and health of their children.

[. . .] The tabu against broad beans could, it was suggested, be explained on the simple supposition that Pythagoras himself or one of his associates had G6PD deficiency and was aware from direct experiene of the crises of favism.

[. . .] In concluding this review of modern opinions, I should stress the success of the anthropological analysis of the broad bean prohibition. It does indeed resonate with totemism.

[. . .] The magical thought of the Presocratic thinkers is known to us only through the filter of their rationalizing successors. We know nothing of the real rootedness of Pythagoras's teaching in his personal experience of life. We know only a few bits of his teachings in any case, and they are only what writers of the fourth century B.C. chose to transmit."

 

[celtic]

Given the broad range of pythagoras knowledge, his traditional views of beans may have something to do with an acquired knowledge of molecular biology.

From the book "The Cosmic serpent" here are a few quotes which may have some relation.

In Their visions, shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to information related to DNA, which they call "animate essences" or "spirits." This is where they see double helixes, twisted ladders, and chromosome shapes.

This might relate to what was said in Mal7 post, when pythagoras qouted "the souls of the dead are in the bean."

And here's another qoute that caught my attention in relation to the brain.

and they unanimously claimed that certain psychoactive substances (containing molecules that are active in the human brain) influence the spirits in precise ways.

He could have told his follows not to eat beans as an result of a side affect which could have preceded from the vital energy of the beans.